Once again, we find ourselves
thanking an unrepresentable being for Welsh National Opera’s commitment to its
mission. It is a sad state of affairs when a season that includes both Boulevard
Solitude and Moses und Aron
is considered exceptional, but it is – and is all the more so when one
contrasts such seriousness of purpose with the endless revivals of La traviata which, Die
Frau ohne Schatten notwithstanding, seem to occupy so much of the Royal
Opera’s effort. That said, if the Royal Opera has not undertaken what would be
only its second ever staging of Schoenberg’s masterpiece – the first and last
was in 1965, long before most of us were born! – then at least it has engaged
in a very welcome ‘WNO at the Royal Opera House’ relationship, in which we in London
shall have the opportunity to see some of the fruits of the more adventurous
company’s endeavours.

All of that would be more or
less in vain, were the results not to attain the excellence Schoenberg demands.
They were, in pretty much every respect, any of the doubtless inevitable
shortcomings being of relatively minor importance. This was probably the finest
work I have yet heard from Lothar Koenigs – to whose partnership with David
Pountney we clearly owe many thanks.There can be no faking the necessary depth of musical understanding in
this score, any more than there can be in Wagner or Brahms (or, indeed,
anything that matters). Koenigs’s textual clarity and clarity of purpose not
only enabled the drama to develop; they were in good part the Wagnerian
embodiment, even representation, of the musical drama – not the least here of
Schoenberg’s dialectics. There were occasional slips by the WNO Orchestra, but
in no sense did they detract from a wholehearted contribution, which might have
suggested that the work had been in its repertoire for years. (Recent Wagner,
Berg, and indeed Henze will have done no harm, but even so…)

Perhaps the most exceptional
work of all – though opera is, or at least should be, one of the supreme
elevations of collaboration over miserable, bourgeois ‘competition’ – came from
the WNO Chorus. In an interview to accompany Pierre Boulez’s second recording
of Moses, Schoenberg’s great –
alongside the very different Michael Gielen, his greatest? – interpreter and critic remarked:‘People always say that it’s not an opera but
an oratorio, which Schoenberg later turned into an opera. That interested me,
because I disagree with it. The chorus, for example, is the most important
character in the opera. It’s like a chameleon, speaking for or against,
sometimes even internally divided or emphatic in its support of one particular
party; it is angry, it is docile, it comments on the action.’ Musically and
dramatically – indeed, quite rightly there seemed little distinction to be made
– the chorus succeeded in fulfilling Boulez’s and Schoenberg’s expectations.
Whether en masse, soloistically, or at
various stages of in between, whether singing, speaking or at various stages of
in between, Schoenberg’s highly charged and often ravishingly beautiful choral
writing – I was often set thinking of his psalm settings – were faithfully,
viscerally communicated. And of course, communication, both its necessity and
its impossibility, is very much the thing in this of all operas; or rather, it
is one of the things, all of them, like the score itself derived entirely from
a single row, proceeding from the necessity and impossibility of representing
the Almighty Himself. If indeed that is who He is, for at least at times, an
element of doubt should and did set in, with respect to whether Moses is on the
wrong track all together. This is and was a drama, not a tract.

I had my moments of doubt
concerning the production too. Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, as revived –
very well, insofar as I could tell – by Jörg Behr present the entirety of the
action in a single, courtroom venue. Lawis of course a concern of the drama in several respects, the law-giving
properties of the twelve-note method involved in a complicated, dramatically
generative relationship with Mosaic law and the law of Creation itself.
Moreover, as Aron points out to Moses, the Tables of the Law are ‘images also,
just part of the whole idea’. That said, the idea or ideas of law do not seem
to be especially emphasised, and – without wishing for some entirely
impractical as well as undesirable Cecil B. de Mille Biblical ‘epic’
presentation, which would make only too clear the truth of Adorno's charge that grand opera prepared the way for popular cinema – it is difficult to feel, at least at first, that there is not an
element of dramatic constriction in the monothematic scenic realisation. (I am
not entirely sure what was meant by the description of having been ‘based on an
original design by Anna Viebrock’, given that no further design work was credited.)

(Aron) Rainer Trost

And yet, so long as one is
prepared to do some thinking – and anyone who is not should not be allowed anywhere
near this opera – it is perfectly possible to glean a great deal; what appears
to be constriction was in some sense also mental liberation, which again is one
of the crucial dialectics at work in the drama itself, concerned as it and
indeed all modern philosophy are with the Kantian antinomy between freedom and
determinism. Not only can the courtroom – if indeed that is what it was –
readily convert itself, sometimes with a little scenic rearrangement but above
all through the engagement of our minds, into a venue for political and/or
religious activity or, through Aron’s manipulative-representational skills,
into a cinema, upon which the crowd can watch the orgy, as we watch the crowd.
We, the receptive and creative audience – at least, that is what we should be –
have to employ our minds to represent what the Israelites were seeing, and thus
to engage in that very necessity and impossibility of representation of which
Moses and Aron spoke and sang.That is
not to say, of course, that we should never see what goes on; Reto Nickler’s
excellent Vienna production (available on DVD, under the inspired musical
direction of Daniele Gatti, with the Vienna orchestra playing this music as
only it can) shows what can be done with modern communicative messages of
advertising and pornography. But what first seems as though it may simply be a
cowardly – or even financially necessary – abdication of responsibility is
revealed to be something much more interesting and, at some level, even
provocatively Schoenbergian.

John Tomlinson’s assumption
of the title role was predictably imposing. There was a good deal of what Gary
Tomlinson has called the ‘Michelangesque terribilità’
of Schoenberg’s flawed hero, though I could not help but feel that the
melodrama was overdone in the final scene. Still, the tragic grandeur, very
much in the line of Wotan,of
Tomlinson’s Moses was unquestionable. Although he seemed to have tired a little
in the first half of the second act, Rainer Trost’s Aron proved a fine foil. I
am not sure I have heard so clear a contrast between Sprechstimme and sinuous twelve-note bel canto (with a good deal of Siegfried et al. thrown in). Spatial
matters played their role in the first act; placing on stage heightened the
unbridgeable contrast between the two characters competing on unequal yet still
justified terms. (One should never fall into the trap of saying that Moses is
right and Aron is wrong; Schoenberg tilts the scales but remains some way from
upending them, and there are certainly occasions when Moses is shown to be
unambiguously, even unimaginatively in the wrong.)

Were I to proceed to hymn
musico-dramatic excellence in the smaller roles, I should probably find myself
simply repeating the cast list. However, I shall, in the spirit of the work,
attempt the impossible, and single out Richard Wiegold’s stentorian Priest, the
exemplarily alert contributions of Daniel Grice and Alexander Sprague, and the
– literally – unearthly beauty summoned up by the chorus of six solo voices:
Fiona Harrison, Amanda Baldwin, Sian Meinir, Peter Wilman, Alastair Moore, and
Laurence Cole.For a work that struggles,
like Aquinas, with a theological via negative,
there was a great deal to be positive and thankful about. Three cheers to WNO!To read more about Moses und Aron, please click here.

1 comment:

Thanks for your as ever intelligent observations. A happy change from most of the papers... However, i had some serious reservations about the production i think it worth ventilating. I tick you HAVE to have a visible Burning Bush, or you lose the concrete irony of Moses being convinced by evidence and then having to convince people without it (which to my mind is sufficient explanation of his declared inadequacy as advocate). In a directly parallel way you need an actual Golden Calf. Not just because it is easy - you could make a perfectly decent idol out of chicken wire,some expanded polystyrene, some polygrout, and a spray-can of gold paint, total budget, twenty quid - but because without it how can you contrast it with the einziger, ewiger, allgegenwärtiger, unsichtbarer und unvorstellbarer Gott" An equally dematerialised and invisible Golden Calf is so asinine (I mean actively stupid, not just dozily bovine) that I'm amazed that a contemporary German stage designer would be so inept. I think it also had bad repercussions elsewhere, when the 'Dance of the Slaughterers' and the 'Orgy of Drunkenness and Dancing' – possibly the most rhythmically inventive music Schoenberg ever came up with? – had to be presented as instrumentals, with everyone on stage keeping very, very still. Not a good idea...

More trivially - I'm impressed you came up with the stage-as-courtroom, which i didn't really grasp (no judge, no jury, etc.). And certainly it was very clear to me that the Israelites were supposed to be watching the Golden Calf on screen. The stage was filled with raked cinema seating. Again, a lousy idea; not least on the grounds of verisimilitude. Anyone who has ever tried to snog someone else in a cinema seat would know better than to try and imagine going further in such an environment. You'd put your back out something chronic!